Please Don't Ask How I Found You, Charlie
by hillary adelheide
Summary: A series of replies to Charlie from the friend he writes to. Conflicted, angsty, emotional, and real. This is me putting a voice to what The Perks of Being a Wallflower does for a hopeless kid-what a profound impact it can have.
1. Chapter 1

**_"Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless."_ **

**G. K. Chesterton (English born Gabonese Critic, Essayist, Novelist and Poet, 1874-1936)**

_Disclaimer: I do not own The Perks of Being a Wallflower. _

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Dear Charlie,

I am that person that you wrote all of those things to. I don't even know how to begin this, because I know you and I don't know you and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be. I think your letters have helped me more in these last few months than sending them to me could ever have helped you, but I guess I can't know for sure. Please don't ask me how I found you because I don't want you to think that I'm crazy or be angry at me because really I just want you to know that yes, I read your letters. Like you, I am both happy and sad and trying to figure out how that could be.

Now I'm writing to you because I know, more than you ever knew about me, that you are that person who would know and understand. I felt the need to write this right now because it's been a really bad day. I've just been puttering around all day with that wired and tired feeling that I sometimes get but that never really seems to go away. I wanted to do, do, do, do, but I just wanted to lay there. For two hours I teetered on the edge, for a while things were pleasant and the window was open and the morning was beautiful and my cat was especially pleasant and the coffee was hot and rich and the air smelled so sweet and my robe was so plush. For a short while it was wonderful. Then I was so empowered I started to clean the living room. And after a while I sat on the couch and looked at the patterns in the rug and the paint splatters on the ceiling and the curls of the candle sconces and suddenly everything was very wrong. Existence in that moment was something sick and pervasive and I needed to crawl into a very quiet private place and wait for it all to be right again. I'm not sure if those moments are normal or abnormal or if they happen to everyone and only certain people like me stop and reflect on the suddenness of the attack and the aftermath it causes. This, Charlie, this I knew you would understand. Then I get stuck in the sick sad. So all day I wanted to get up and accomplish and yet couldn't bring myself to forsake the comfort of that silence. My mood gets a little wacky but again, I can't tell if it's something about me or if it's just that I acknowledge these moods, that I stop to reflect on the passing of everything.

Your honesty broke something Charlie. I never expected you to tell me so much, to reveal everything, and for what purpose Charlie? Somehow on the most lonely days last year I found your letters in the mail. Then things were okay.

The last few weeks have been so empty. I'm really feeling a certain absence of purpose. There were moments in the last few months when I could look at something as simple as a cup of coffee or a cute dog or a beautiful sky and feel infinite. (Thanks Charlie.) This morning the perfection of a moment about knocked me over in it's completion. It was nothing, and yet it was enough. A moment of completion that was enough to make me suddenly reflect on my emptiness. Then things became quiet.

There were moments this summer that were so intricate in their simplicity that even the memory makes me want to cry. The solitary moments, the ones that were just a butterfly landing perfectly on the shrub outside my front door, then I, standing quietly in the everyday chaos of my parking lot, enjoying the delicate flutter of wings.

After I calmed down this morning I went to the street fair with some friends. Something about the atmosphere at the Fair stabbed all the way through the layers of apathy surrounding me and landed smack between the ribs. It's odd. It's kind of ghastly even. Have you noticed how children are so often used in horror movies, something so innocent and cute surrounded by horror and gore is so much more disturbing. A ghoulish child scares you half to death but a zombie or something you would expect has become cliche. This is why I found the Fair so sickening. I found something subtle and beautiful about the heart of the little town because I always have a certain fondness for the character in the old brick buildings and small little hole in the wall places and diners and picturesque tree lined streets. Old news. So there I was, roaming the sidewalks with my face held high, looking in all of the old wavy glass windows, completely enthralled. I was searching for subtle details and my eyes kept meeting the eyes of strangers, then they would look away. Disturbed or something. I don't know. I guess if I was just walking through a fair with a funnel cake on the brain and some strange person met me square in the eyes and stared me straight through I would look away too. But I was kind of grossed out by the things going on in the fair. Some guys taking sideways glances and teeny bop butts and little boys smoking cigarettes and ten year old girls with cleavage and the whole scheme of everything. It doesn't get much dirtier in any way than a street fair. And even the enjoying, the enjoying of the company was all wrong. No one I hang out with anymore has the same appreciation for the same things as I do. I walk like a tornado, just wanting to see everything, and everyone else hangs back, wanting to do and experience.

I want to be one of the two friends sitting on a stoop in the canopy of a little tree with the first fallen leaves swirling around our feet while we smile in the silence and enjoy the company of the other. I want something simple. Instead I have my little sister with some kind of attitude and her older boyfriend who used to be my best friend, and the sexual tension in the air of a thousand people and my older brother flirting with my little sister's friend and my little brother just beginning to look at the world as a play ground and it was all very perfect in their company but all of our motives just a little bit off. I couldn't understand the mood or the atmosphere, it was tense and not. And it wouldn't have been, it didn't have to be.

Then of course the minor things. The constant worry of my parents on whether or not I am a bad influence to my younger siblings. Was I a bad influence? The thought was disturbing because in my head I had a very distinct image of myself and the gradual distancing that began between my image of myself and my reality that began around that time has been a serious form of discontent in my life. I don't know what I am. I am what my mother hated because I was a free spirit of sorts (?? best description I've got) because I am a free thinker and all that nonsense. But I think it should be refreshing. I don't get sometimes the fine line between refreshing and threatening as far as independence and free thought are concerned. I don't get exactly what I did to make them hate me. I existed I guess. I have to square with that and yeah the distance between myself and my family really hurts. I won't lie.

I read your letters Charlie, and I asked myself why every single time I reach out and it hurts me I reach again. But I have to. You know, I think it's like breathing in a burning room. It hurts every time you take a breathe because the air is hot and full of smoke. It sears your lungs, burns your nose and throat, catches you in a fit of coughing so intense you almost lose the chance to inhale for a second time, but yet you have to inhale again, and again, because you need air, regardless of the quality it's all you've got, and if you want to make it you have to go back again and again and force your vulnerable clean lungs to suck in the filth and wretched smoke it you ever intend to stop the fire.

What a night. I'm really tired. Really. I'm sorry for bothering you Charlie but you're like that friend I could sit with in the silence and know that you are also enjoying the subtle details, that friend who would be a part of the silence that puts it all back where it should be. I wish we could all deserve to have a moment like that in our existence, a Charlie moment that's so pure and perfect in its simplicity it's transcendent.

Again, Thank You Friend, for your letters and for not leaving me so lonely.


	2. Chapter 2

_"All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on."_  
**Henry Ellis**

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Charlie,

I had to write you again, because I needed to tell you one more time how important you and your letters have been to me. I hope my letters are as welcome to you as yours were to me. I know I can never be as profound to you, and that our lives and stories are very different, but you are still my friend that can sit in the silence with me and just: know.. I need you to know how special you are, and especially today, I need someone who will understand the depths of defeat and triumph that can assault you when you're least prepared.

I found a journal that I kept when I was 14, and I read it. I remembered a dark that had been consuming me for a long time before I read your letters and you helped make everything right again.  
I am dying inside thinking of that girl who was me, such a short time ago.  
I wanted to die. That makes me so upset. I really wanted it. I wanted everything to end. The only thing that I felt like I had to live for was this boy- something that turned out to be superficial in the end. I did truly love him- because he was something that symbolized the caring and need that I should have felt from the rest of my family. Quite literally the only reason I cared so much for that boy was that I needed to believe in him to feel like I could believe in me. Me was all I had. It's stereotypical, isn't it? A young girl who put too much stock in someone else... How I wish I could have had friends like Sam and Patrick, and you.  
I just wish that I could go back in time. I would do anything to go back in time and just hold the younger version of me and reassure her. Tell her that everything will turn out right- that I will fall into a much better love, that I will learn what it is to give, and to humbly receive. I wish I could tell that poor girl that there is something to live for, and that the horribly misguided little boy who just wanted sex was not going to come through for her. Tell her that she was right to love him, completely right to give her love to a boy who was so much in need, but not to put stock in his love for her saving her from anything. I wish I could tell the girl, the girl who is so violent and angry in her monologues, that there is no need for that. That things could be so different, that some day she will be able to escape from the oppression of silence and move into a world where she can make anything, do anything, be anything.  
Every loop in the handwriting makes me remember the screams in my heart. Every single tear that smeared the ink on the pages makes me want to break through time and space just to show her that, though the future me is not nearly as she expected I would be, I am here. I am very much alive. I am happy. I am in love- and that means she made it. She weathered through. The beatings, the horrible things that were said and done, the things that were taken from her and forced on her against her will, the cuts, the anger and violence in her heart, have all evaporate. I wish I could assure her that it has not scarred too deeply; that I am not still suffering, and have not, for a very long time. I want to show her that I exist and am very alive and did not die as I so wanted to.  
What would I say to that girl if I could go back to those angry, lonely days, and console her? Would she want to live, seeing who I've become? I'm not sure, something that saddens me completely, but I think she would see that I am happy most days, (the sick sad, the still and silent… they come less and less.) I think she would hold on.  
I think I would tell her that the things she craves from mom and dad are never going to be. She wants a love from them that they cannot give. The love that she is aching for and seeking so badly is the love that a healthy person feels toward herself. There is a big aching hole, where her heart should be rooting for itself, where her optimism and power to break through the bad and seek the good should be, and in its place is something broken, something whose mechanisms have been destroyed, and because it can see no way out the only thing it wants to do is self-destruct to end the pain.  
The worst part is, I'm not sure how much comfort I could be to her. I can tell her that for the next four years she will be like a machine. She will not come to know passion as she had longed and hoped for. She will learn to love a more steady, strong kind of reliability. The passion she expected is only an illusion. She will have times that will come and go and she will remember nothing more than the aching of her feet and back once the day is done. She will be so tired that months, even years will pass without any reflection of time, but there will be a new, tiny thing in her heart called Hope. She will have no where to go, there will be times when the only thing standing between her and absolute nothingness is a fourteen year old hunk of junk on wheels. All that will matter in her entire life is the view through that windshield. She will be broken at times, but never more broken then she was in that moment in the evening of February 15. 2005.  
She will look at me with tears in her eyes and ask me who will pull the knife out of her hand. She is sure it will be the boy. I smile at her and tell her gently who she should be putting stock in is herself, because it is I who pull the knife away. Her somewhere, deep down, knowledge that I exist, that I will someday grow out of that broken girl, who was dead in spirit, and take the knife right out of her shaking hand.  
I tell her that I know her well, I can remember the piercing feeling that no one loves her. I can remember it so well that I need to clutch at my chest to keep it from consuming me and burning through the numbness and apathy that protect me when I need them to. I tell her that nobody will ever understand just how real and true her pain is, except me. I reassure her that it's real. That she is not weak or wrong for feeling it. I tell her that she wants to live, because that I do remember. I do remember wanting to know, having a burning curiosity, just somewhere slightly out of reach of the burning alive that was happening to me every day. I remember wondering what love felt like. I want to explain to her what it feels like in that moment of innocence lost. I want to tell her that love is the kind of thing that evolves over time, that the first taste is bitter sweet, but that it's a need that will grow until it's acute to the point of hunger. I know she longs to find out what prom will be like. I want to tell her that she worked so hard to buy that beautiful dress, and that she will look beautiful and radiant in it. I want to tell her that the boy who really and truly does love her will take her and give her red roses on a corsage that will shine bright in her memories of the night for years. I want to tell her that someday she will inherit a family who loves her as her own should have. I want to tell her that she will graduate high school with honors and make an inspiring speech. I want to tell her that she will make her own way. I would tell her of all the good times waiting. She will make friends who will love her, appreciate her, and make her laugh raucously.  
I think I would even tell her that she would come to know success in jobs. She wasn't aware yet of the streak of work ethic, little merited, but present in her heart. How passionately she will dedicate herself to her work, to her hobbies, to her home. I want to remind her that as time elapses and things morph, that she will mature, and though she thinks herself worldly, someday she will realize how the screaming dissipates into the past like vapors, and leaves hurts just deep enough that she will wince when remembering them, but that time will ebb and flow until the stabs are gone and all that is left will be dull ache.  
I'm scared to tell her that in a few months' time that boy will break her heart. She will dangle at the brink of life and death for days, because he was all she had, except herself. She will realize that the only love in her life that she recognized was skin-deep, and only one thing will save her and allow me to be here typing this. Something in her heart will break completely. She will cry for hours and put down her cigarette, and realize that be damned to that boy, she is going to make it. Just like that, it will click, her reason for living will transfer itself, and it will continue to do so, every time her heart is broken, and the reason that she will always have a reason, is because deep down she wants to live. Plain and simple. In any form, in any context, she wants to live, and she knows that as bad as everything had been up until that point she must have only experienced the dregs of existence, and that it only had to get better. No boy could erase depression; he couldn't have stopped anyone from hurting her any more than her own weak arms had. The true defense and triumph was going to come later, in her heart and in her memories of the dark times.  
That mislead boy would break her heart, would tear her into peaces for loving him. He would go on, move away, love another, have a kid, never really change.  
She would evolve slowly. One day she would stand in her own home, with a job, and a cat, and a boyfriend. She would unload her dishwasher, start her dryer, set her alarm clock. She would go to sleep and have sweet dreams, and in the morning, she would awake and find that her life was just as beautiful and worth living as it was the day before.

Today I feel infinite. When I remember what I've conquered, and mostly with your help, everything has found a good comfortable spot in my head. I'm going outside now to meet the sky. Days like today I just want to lay in the grass and make shapes out of clouds.

I hope you are doing well Charlie, really and truly well.


End file.
